The Yellow Apple Paradigm
by MrsVincentCrabbe
Summary: COMPLETE. Prompt: A stork, a pair of mittens, and a green apple. Sheldon/Penny
1. The Green Apple

Sheldon Cooper only ate green apples. Therefore, when Penny declared that she hated green apples, it was Battle Royale.

"Don't be ridiculous, Penny. Red apples are the peasantry of the apple social hierarchy, if I might call it." Sheldon took a bite from his washed, re-washed, cored, peeled, sliced and prettily arranged plate of green apple. "They were made to endure the hardships of the mass supermarket chains and long cross-country transport. As a direct result, the farmer cross germinated hardy but less savory apples. I don't see their place beyond the indentured servant hood of canning."

Penny kept reading her Cosmo magazine while chomping right into the skin of her red apple. Sheldon watched as the juice dribbled over her chin and threatened to drop onto her pages before her long, lilthe fingers swooped up to scrub it from her flesh in the nick of time. She flipped the page and looked up at him with her trademark "I give a crap?" stare.

"Sheldon, I classify apples in two groups: sweet ones and sour ones. Green apples are sour," she said as if speaking to a small child, "and I don't like sour apples."

"That's ridiculous," he took a dainty bite of another slice of his apple, always skipping one apple in the cirlce to ensure an even pattern on his plate.

"Sheldon" she sighed, her mouth full of little half masticated lumps of apple flesh, "just because you don't like something, doesn't make it ridiculous."

"That's ridic-" she shot him the death glare, "preposterous." She sighed and stood, stretching a little before folding up her Cosmo and lopping into their kitchen. "Yes, just take whatever you want."

"Sheldon, was that sarcasm?" she turned around and looked at him, surprise evident on her face.

"Is counterpart inertia proportional to mass?"

"Huh?"

"Yes, it was." Sheldon noticed his apple pattern had been thrown off in his inattention so he set about rearranged his slices in a new imitation of a Buckminsterfullerene, or C-60, atomic structure, two dimensionally of course.(1)

"Ugh, Sheldon," she sighed as she threw herself on the couch next to him, "I'm not sure I can marry you if you are even anal about the pattern in which your apples lay on the plate."

"You knew I was particular," he emphasized the word as the replacement for 'anal', which he disliked as a description for his habits, "when you agreed."

"So I guess that would make me an Indian giver?" she laughed, not actually taking back to word but hypothesizing playfully.

"No, it was the white man that gave his word to the Native Americans and then rescinded that oath."

"Whatever," she took another bite of her red apple. "what about yellow apples?"

"Excuse me?" he said, shifting an errant slice back into alignment.

"Do you have an opinion on yellow apples?"

"I've never tried a yellow apple." Penny lent over and kissed him sweetly, the juice of her red apple still fresh and mingling with the juice of his green one.

"What was that for?" She set herself up to give him a death glare before he quickly covered himself, "Not that I am complaining."

"That, Sheldon, was a yellow apple. A mix of a green and a red."

"Yellow is a primary color; you can't make it from red and green." Penny just smiled.

"Yes, but red and green are complementary colors. They go good together." Penny got up from the couch, and with a pat on the cheek, left Sheldon to ponder this new little ditty she'd cooked up. Sheldon, still a little confused, looked down at his apple plate. He had never been good at these sort of romance metaphors but his time with Penny had been giving him the tools he needed to sort through her vague words and derive the real meaning.

"We're the yellow apple," he muttered to himself before smiling secretly.

Sheldon Cooper only ate green apples; scratch that. Sheldon Cooper only ate green and yellow apples.

(1) Think soccer ball pattern.


	2. The Perfect Pair of Gloves

AN: I took a little liberty with the pair of mittens and made them a pair of gloves. Hope that's alright. It's a similar concept. I just, what's the word, tweaked a little. Call it artistic license.

Chapter Two: The Perfect Pair of Gloves

Penny had had her perfect wedding dress picked out from the time she was seven years old. It would a slightly off white with a fitted bodice and a long ballgown skirt. The bodice would have a sweetheart cut with off the shoulder cuff sleeves and the skirt would pull away from the body just slightly at the hip. Then, the whole of the gown out be covered with a layer of antique (not yellowed or old but classy, white antique) lace to bring back the traditions and everlastings that came with weddings. She had old drawings she had done of this dress folded up in a box under her bed. She had fooled around with adding the latest fashions and seeing if she liked anything changed but she always came back to this design. This was her dream dress. So, when Sheldon Cooper (Ph.D) asked her to marry him, she had first called the bridal shop to set up a fitting and then her mother (whose first question was whether or not Penny had already scheduled the fitting.)

Penny was sitting in her bridal suite, preparing to walk down the aisle to marry the man she never would have dreamed of; a theoretical physicist with two Ph. Ds. Her mother was curling her hair as she looked down at all her accessories. Penny had done well in fulfilling her dream bridal gown. Instead of a sweetheart cut, she opted for a neckline that went straight across (Sheldon would appreciate the minimalism) and she had changed her color from off-white to ivory, but it was still the dress of her dreams. She pulled on the elbow length gloves she had always wanted and clipped on the earrings her father had given her ("your mother wore them when we were married") and her grandmother's pearl bracelet. She clasped on the yellow apple necklace that Sheldon had given her as his wedding present last night at the rehearsal dinner (the fourth one that Sheldon insisted on having to verify the quality of the food.) Sheldon had had to make it himself (though, for a scientist, it wasn't hard to make yellow lacquer to replace the red he had had to chip out of the apple mold by hand.) Her mother thought it was tacky but Penny didn't mind; it meant more to her than her mother could know.

"Well, darling," her mother said, tears thickening her voice, "you've got something old, and something new, something borrowed (I want those earrings back, darling) and something..." her mother looked all around. "Do you have something blue?"

"What?"

"Something blue, darling."

"I thought you were bringing Great-Aunt Lucille's sapphire broach?"

"Darling, I don't have Great-Aunt Lucille's sapphire broach. She was buried with it."

"Great, mother, I don't have something blue!" Penny must have said this louder than she thought because she heard her husband-to-be-in-five-minutes knock on the door. She went up to the door but refused to open it.

"Penny, what's going on in there?" He tried the knob but she held it fast.

"I don't have anything blue," she told him through the wood.

"Penny, you've got to stop with all this superstitious nonsense."

"No," she said flatly. "Sheldon, it's tradition." She could hear him thinking outside the door. She loved to hear him think. It was never silent with Sheldon; you could hear his mind whirring on all cylinders, purring like the engine of a car as he thought.

"Hold on a moment." She could feel his presence leave and she heard the doors of the church opening.

"Why, he's leaving!" her mother said, staring out the window. Penny rushed over as fast as she could in her full skirt to watch Sheldon pop the trunk of the limousine and take out his emergency rations bag.

"What the hell is he getting out of there?" Penny said. She watched as he pulled out his hermetically sealed bag and opened it with his emergency pocket knife. Penny was confused; why was he exposing all the bandages and medical instruments he had boiled the night before to the elements? He pulled out a pair of blue latex medical gloves before methodically placing all the objects (save the gloves) in the bag and returning it to the limo trunk (he insisted they bring it on the honeymoon "in case of emergency".) He walked back in, the picture of collected calm and knocked on her door again. She opened it a crack and he slipped in the blue gloves.

"It was the best I could do, given our current environment and the resources available therein." Penny's mother had a slight sneer on her face and Penny almost looked like she didn't know what to think. Sheldon slipped his hand out and walked back to his place at the front of the church, standing nervously beside his best man, Leonard, and his groomsmen Howard (who was busy winking at one of the bridesmaids) and Raj (who was trying very hard not to look like a deer in the headlights).

"You're not going to wear those, are you, darling?"

"Don't suppose I have any other options," Penny humped her shoulders. She hurriedly pulled off the long gloves she had wished for as a girl and slipped on Sheldon's too big latex gloves.

It wasn't until she was walking down the aisle, carrying her carefully chosen bouquet of orange blossom (wisdom), myrtle (love), and scarlet Zinnia (constancy), that she realized that it didn't matter about her blue latex medical gloves. She stood there, her hands held by Sheldon's, and she didn't even remember she was wearing them. And when it came time for him to say "I do" and place the ring on her finger, and he carefully peeled each finger of the glove away and folded it neatly over his arm like it was silk, she knew. The elbow length ivory gloves of her dreams had been all wrong. These had been the perfect pair of gloves.


	3. The Stork

Part III: The Stork

Dr. and Mrs. Sheldon Cooper were laying flat on their backs in the bed they had shared as husband and wife for the past year and a half; Sheldon out of habit and Penny from necessity. At nearly eight months pregnant, she couldn't quite get comfortable in any other position. Sheldon had been quietly trying to go to sleep but his wife loud and repetitive sighing was keeping him from his much needed rest.

"Something bothering you?" he said in a typical Sheldon tone, using polite phraseology but obviously only trying to bring her attention to the fact she was keeping him up. Even after the 18 months of marriage and two years of friendship before that, he didn't realize all he had done was invite her to talk.

"Well, I was just thinking over what we were going to name h-, it." Sheldon had told Penny he didn't want to know, insisting he would find a credible marker from external examination that would belay the sex of the baby. He was under the impression that it was a girl based on the weight Penny had gained, the hormonal changes visualized in her production of sebum (Penny had later googled this to find out it was hair oil), and the area in which Penny was carrying the baby. He was, of course, using fancy science words for an old wives' tale: high and in front, a girl, low and in back, a boy.

"We should have talked this over eight months ago, not at midnight on a Sunday."

"I know but I didn't want to spend eight months going through the pros and cons of every name in the baby book, analyzing them on historical significance and their etymology." Penny had to smile at herself; all these years with the boys had surely expanded her vocabulary. "I just wanted to pick something that felt...right."

"Well, good thing for you, I did all that without you." Penny sighed and put a hand to her eyes. Of course he did. Did she not know her husband? He had started to get up and retrieve the list but she put her other hand out and let her fingers run down his wrist.

"I'll look at it all in the morning. We'll discuss it after you get home from the university. But you are not to poll the guys or hold a vote. We'll decide this ourselves."

"Very well," he agreed, hoping that she'd let him sleep now. It wasn't like he was going to get much when the baby came. He would need to buy some earplugs. He laid back beside her and tucked his covers in the way he let a little smile slip when he had silence and thought he would finally sleep.

"Where'd you get your name?" Sheldon suppressed the eye roll he felt sneaking up on him.

"My mother, where else?" Penny let her eyes freely wheel around their orbit and gave him the 'I do not approve' look.

"I just meant, your name is Sheldon and your twin sister is named Missy. They don't exactly match."

"What did you expect? Missy and Mister?" Penny smacked his arm but smiled despite herself.

"No, I just meant...I mean, _Sheldon_?"

"Yes, I've gotten that quite a lot. It was my grandfather's name." Sheldon looked over at his wife. "What about Penelope? I very much doubt that was a popular name among the girls in Nebraska."

"Hence, Penny," she smiled. "I think my mother got it from a book or a movie."

"Oh, _The Odyssey_?"

"No." Sheldon rolled his eyes; could he really have expected? Penny fiddled with her yellow apple necklace as looked to the clock on the night stand and Sheldon thought this would be when she would suggest they sleep. She took in a deep breath.

"Where did your mother tell you babies came from?" God, what had brought this on? "My mother told me babies came from the stork and you had be a married woman before the stork would come and ask you and your husband if you wanted a boy or a girl."

"And you believed this?"

"I was seven. When I was twelve, the school told me that the stork didn't exist and by sixteen, I knew it didn't," she giggled.

"My mother told me babies came from K-Mart. Of course, being the child prodigy I was, I ask where they kept the babies because I had never seen them at K-Mart before."

"You believed her?"

"I was three and half," he sighed. "She told me they kept them in the ladies' bathroom," that rare smile she loved broke out on his face at the funny story of his...infanthood? "Of course, by five I had figured out mammalian reproduction."

"You figured it out?"

"I had an encyclopedia," he deadpanned. Sheldon couldn't hold back the yawn he had been suppressing for an hour and his wife patted his arm lovingly.

"I'm keeping you up." She lent over and kissed him goodnight.

"I want to name her Marie," he said before dropping right into sleep. Penny smiled her sly little smile as she scooted closer to her husband's body. She wasn't about to tell him it was a boy.

The END.


End file.
